Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Friday, November 24, 2006

Aurabesh?

Aurabesh is not a language or script, but an alternative alphabet for English which is used in the Star Wars Saga. It is not in Unicode and never will be, but you can play with it by downloading a font like this one, and using it while typing normally with the US keyboard layout. My name in Aurabesh looks like this:

2 comments:

Out of curiosity ... what stops Aurabesh from being supported within the Unicode framework? Is it a policy / convention issue (i.e. real languages only) or something else? And do the same constraints apply to Klingon, Cylon, the darker Tolkien goblin glyph-tongues, and so on?

I think Aurabesh would be excluded by its very limited usage and also because it is just a sort of cypher of the normal English alphabet. If I remember right, Klingon script has been considered and rejected, while the two Tolkien scripts, Tengwar and Cirth, may someday make it. The official text says that Unicode does not encode "idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private-use characters" or "logos or graphics" or "font variants" or non-text related graphologies like dance notation.